Author: Sophie Beach

Sophie Beach lives in Berkeley, California. She previously served as senior research associate for Asia at the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based press freedom organization. She received her master’s degree from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Her writing about China has been published in the Los Angeles Times, the Asian Wall Street Journal, the South China Morning Post, The Nation magazine, and other publications.

To mark the end of the year, CDT has collected the top ten most read stories on our site in 2016. Stories revealing government censorship, especially from our Directives from the Ministry of Truth and Sensitive Words series, were popular favorites once again, as were translations of netizen voices standing up to political power. (For more on the topics singled out for censorship in